We have held useful and candid talks, which we both believe warrant positive coverage at the news conference.

Our countries enjoy traditionally friendly relations. We are united by similar or even identical approaches to the key issues of the modern world.

We focused particularly on promoting bilateral relations, which have really taken off, especially in trade and the economy. Of particular importance is our continued cooperation in the oil and gas industry, the power industry and the military-technical sphere. Russian economic operators, primarily LUKOIL and Gazprom Neft, as well a number of other companies, are working in Iraq and are contributing substantially to the revenue side of the Iraqi budget.

An interview of the President of the Union of Oil and Gas Operators of Russia, Yuri Shafranik, to the magazine “International Life”

‒ Yuri Konstantinovitch, how would You like to describe the actual state of the relations between the Federation of Russia and the EU? What is the real damage caused by the sanctions to Russia?

‒ I’d like to cover this topic from some other side. In the first place you should correctly assess the foregoing trends. In 1990-th we were living through a great calamity, the disintegration of a great state. This had an enormous impact on us, as politically, as much as economically. But looking at 2000-th, in case of any aggravation of the relations and in controversies with the West all the opponents may put their signature under the phrase: “Russiawas consequently integrating into the political and economic institutions of the world”.

Asiatic-Pacific front. Korea, 1945. The Japanese Imperial army had been defeated. The Korean peninsula had just been divided along the 38th Parallel into two zones of influence: American and Soviet. The Allies guarding the border were so close to each other; the mutual interest was as intense as at the Elbe in Europe, though it was not as broadly publicized. The National Archives stores a photo, taken in Korea on September 12, 1945.

THE TITLE needs a question mark. Indeed, did the Big Three halt a step away from global cooperation? How many mines were laid under the alliance and partnership and when? Natalia Narochnitskaia once said that "Yalta and counter-Yalta were born together."

“Never in my life there has been any experience to meet, in any nation, a person, who might so ardently and passionately love his motherland, as Griboedov loved Russia”, - Faddey Bulgarin spoke of his friend, whose activities enormously influenced the development of the Russian culture. Later on the author of immortal comedy “The Mischief of Being Clever” will say: “The more educated a person is, the more useful he is to his motherland”. Precisely the ardent patriotic feeling for Russia went with Aleksandr Sergueevich Griboedov during all the dynamic and turbulent life of “one of the most intelligent persons of Russia” of the nineteenth century, as it was expressed by A.S. Pushkin.

On March 26, 1944, after the battles, which had been conducted at the territory of the Central and Western Ukraine, the red Army approached theriverofPrut, State border between theUSSRandRomania. A multimedia exhibition: “Crimes of Nazism. The liberation mission of the Red Army inEurope”, organized be the Russian Military Historical Society, is dedicated to this unforgettable date in the history of the Great Patriotic War. The exhibition is based on documentary evidences regarding terrible, dramatic and heroic events of the war.